An Afflicted Nation Grieves over Nice

The primary sense of the French adjective “affligé ” is “grieving,” or “in distress,” which is undoubtedly the meaning intended by President François Hollande when he addressed his nation, just before four this morning, after rushing from the theatre festival in Avignon to meet with his Cabinet in the capital. “La France est affligée,” he said. For the third time in a year and a half, France is grieving a major terrorist attack. This time, the means was a truck; the place was Nice; but the grief, the horror, the fear are the same as before. Eighty-four people, ten of them children, who had gathered with hundreds of others on the Promenade des Anglais to celebrate Bastille Day with a fireworks show over the Mediterranean, have been killed. Two attacks made a pair. Three make a series. Just yesterday, Hollande announced that the state of emergency put in place after November’s attacks in Paris would finally come to an end on July 26th. It has now been extended once again. “France is going to have to live with terrorism,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said after the Cabinet meeting. “Affligé ” can also be translated as “afflicted,” and, if the word carries with it a sense of cursed inevitability, both its senses have begun to seem equally, horribly valid in France.

There is special pain in the fact that Nice, a provincial city of less than three hundred and fifty thousand, whose main industry is tourism—that is to say, a place synonymous with pleasant days on the beach—should be the site of the latest violence. Last November’s attacks made it clear that ordinary public places, like cafés and theatres and restaurants, could become significant terrorist targets in Paris, rendered symbolic as killing sites by virtue of their very lack of inherent symbolism. With Nice, mainly famous for its sunshine and its salad, the same nihilistic logic would now seem to carry beyond Paris, to just about anywhere in the country. When parents and children enjoying fireworks by the shore is a target, life itself is the target.

Valls drew fire on social media for his attitude of resignation. Since November, the Hollande government has swung between a triumphalist rhetoric that recalls the early days of the War on Terror and a fatalistic tone of pragmatic pessimism. Neither mode has done much to reassure the public of its general safety, or of the Administration’s competence to enforce it. A jingoistic amendment to the constitution, proposed by Hollande in the immediate aftermath of the November attacks, that would strip convicted terrorists who hold dual citizenship of their French nationality led to prolonged, fractious debate and the protest resignation of Christiane Taubira, the Minister of Justice, before finally failing. This muddled response to the terror threat, paired with a fractious spring marked by strikes and protests over a deeply unpopular labor-reform bill, has sunk Hollande’s approval rating to less than twenty per cent, the lowest of any President in the history of the Fifth Republic. With a Presidential election coming up next year, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the xenophobic, ultra-right-wing National Front, has been given ample chance to make the case that she can do better than the Socialists in power. There is a very real chance that the French may yet find out whether or not she’s right.

Still, if something can be taken from Valls’s infelicitous formulation, it’s that the way to get used to living under the threat of sporadic, diffuse terrorism—to flinch at the sound of tires screeching near a café terrace in the same way that we have learned to flinch at the sight of an unattended suitcase at the airport—is just to live. It’s not a heroic reality; it’s just reality. We don’t carry on, as the old manipulative cliché has it, in order to not let “the terrorists win.” We carry on so that we don’t lose what is most worth having.

In Paris, the cafés and restaurants that were attacked in November are back in business. The Bataclan, the site of the hostage massacre at an Eagles of Death Metal concert, will reopen in the fall. On the afternoon of Bastille Day, I biked by La Belle Équipe, one of the targeted cafés in the Eleventh Arrondissement. The last time I saw it, its glass doors were riddled with bullet holes. Now people were sitting outside, trying to catch some sight of the sun during a summer week that felt more like fall.

Paris celebrates the Fourteenth of July with a fireworks display over the Eiffel Tower. I was on my way to Belleville, the hilly neighborhood in the northeastern Twentieth Arrondissement, crowned by a park with a sweeping view of the city below. Belleville has long been rich in immigrant communities—Armenians, Greeks, Sephardic Jews, Chinese, North and sub-Saharan Africans—and, despite encroaching gentrification of the young and hip variety, it continues to be, as it has been historically, populaire, which is to say, “of the people,” poor and working class. (Edith Piaf is the neighborhood’s famous daughter.) Syrian refugees are the latest arrivals. On Eid, the week before, families sat on the sidewalk of the Boulevard de Belleville to ask for food and coins.

A growing crowd watched as the sky grew soft. The Eiffel Tower, dressed in lights, sparkled on. Anticipation built until eleven, when the fireworks began with a sound rather than a visible sign; only the first row could see. The group streamed down to the steep slope of the Rue de Belleville, pressing shoulder to shoulder to try to glimpse a sliver of the show. The more athletic and risk-inclined scaled construction scaffolding. Traffic narrowed to a single lane. In theory, the right to peaceable assembly is as fundamental to the French conception of citizenship as it is to the American one, but in practice it’s something more, a mode of cultural expression as well as an act of political solidarity. Whatever “Frenchness” might be, the fact of many people standing together, in anger, in joy, in protest, in celebration, is at the very core of it.

There have been numerous occasions in French life of late for joined outrage and pain, but not many for joined contentment. The throng on the Rue de Belleville was at least a couple hundred strong, and stood still, watching the tiny, half-obscured bursts of light. The faces, still and squinting, were the better view. People oohed and ahed and laughed at themselves for oohing and ahing. A homemade rocket fizzled and burst on the street with a crack, but though the same thing had caused a panicked stampede a few days before, on the Champ de Mars at a screening of the France-Germany Euro Cup match, nobody moved.

The show ended. People began to disperse. And then the news came from Nice, not in the form of a digital alert—that modern shock of synchronized revelation—but in that of an old, shambling man, shuffling from cluster to cluster to repeat it in a high-pitched, flutelike voice. Those with family in Nice started to make calls. A girl wept, clutching her iPhone to her cheek. People kept dispersing. Soon, the street was empty. Some moments are suffered alone.